| | | My buddy Bob actually came up with this on food stamps etc some time ago,
/Taro
"Many laws of nature can be violated at great hazard only.
Similar to Newton's third law of mechanics (action equals a re-action of same size), there is an equivalent law of economics (and human nature):
If you give a person something, you always take something back, it is thus
required by Mother Nature.
Welfare payments to indigent people make an excellent example.
When government gives money to people, gov't takes back
SOMETHING from them. If nothing else (as is usually the case at
present), the thing taken back is a portion of the recipients self-respect
and incentive to better themselves.
So what happens? They take the "donation", spend it as they feel appropriate,
and spend their spare time looking for the easiest way to generate even
more tax-free income for themselves.
Running drugs, burglaries, generating more children out of wedlock (because they enlarge the effective welfare receipts) are good examples).
And they have PLENTY of spare time, because they don't spend time doing any kind of work in compensation for the largess they receive from gov't.
The result is that we get more and more people looking for new and/or "better"
ways to get on the welfare gravy train. Their incentives are almost 100%
directed toward the gov't gravy train.
MUCH of this problem could be solved quickly and easily, simply by
making welfare payments available only to people who are willing to work
to get them.
Fields could be provided all over the country, where holes could be dug by some welfare recipients, and filled in by others. Over and over.
A silly example perhaps, in some ways, but it illustrates the point.
If such "opportunities" were available to anyone needing income for basic necessities, they could make their own choice, like use their "spare time" to dig
holes for a minimal compensation, or look in private industry for a better
opportunity.
Now you are taking something back in exchange for gov't largess: Labor.
Suddenly, the entire mindset about welfare payments would change its
orientation.
Honest evaluations (and choices), for the first time for many,
would start getting made by people who heretofore had never even
BEGUN to think about employment in private industry.
The principles IMHO are not arguable. Only the details need to be worked out, to the greatest benefit to society at large.
Of course the government bureaucracies already in place to implement our
clearly failing welfare programs will howl in protest, coming up with all
kinds of reasons why nothing should be changed, especially in a direction
that might threaten the need for many of these bureaucrats.
That is something that always happens when a bureaucrat's position is threatened.
But this process must be implemented anyway, or you can be sure we will get
even more of what we have now - large bureaucracies at all levels of government,
more and more people encouraged to get on the welfare gravy train, and greater
and greater stress on society throughout the entire country.
(Of course there must be special provisions made for people who truly cannot
work, or truly cannot travel to a place of "welfare work". But that is a problem
only in the details, and in reality applies to a minimum of the welfare recipients
involved. The ruling principle is still to take something back for what is now so
freely given by government.)
To expect self-supporting tax-payers to work for their living, while providing
absolutely free income to people who do not work at all, makes no sense to
Mother Nature, and results in the welfare and societal mess we live with at present.
Natural Law cannot be overridden by government, at least not without ghastly consequences. |
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